Le débat d'idées en ligne : formes de la violence polémique sur Youtube

This research aims at studying in a discursive perspective the comments following a selection of Youtube videos about the French philosopher Michel Onfray. The discursive practices of Youtube users are defined as belonging to the genre of online public debate. The theoretic frame of our research is on the one hand that of socio-pragmatic analysis of verbal interactions and relational sociology and on the other hand that of persuasion-based theories of argumentation. Flaming on Youtube, which is a characteristic feature of exchanges for the discursive community we have studied, is defined as a form of polemical discourse. The problematic nature of polemical arguments for politeness theories and face-work is also taken into consideration. After offering a sum up of the marks of verbal and polemic violence that we have found in our corpus, we study some examples which allow us to show some of the interactional and argumentative dynamics which characterize polemic exchanges in this Youtube community. We conclude that flaming is quite a normative discursive behaviour on Youtube and we advance some hypothesis for future research.